the entire year.

mountains, but canals could not. Railroads could be used Canals were closed by ice during a fourth of the year. No horses could draw a boat as rapidly as a locomotive could take a railway train. Yet the canals had filled a great purpose. They had first shown that the fertile western prairies could feed the eastern states by carrying produce to them.

488. The Increase of Railroads.-Slowly the railroads were extended, the locomotives and cars improved, and gradually they took the place of canals. They were built at first to connect navigable streams and lakes, but soon lines were constructed independent of the steamboats. The traveler in 1860 could ride on thirty thousand miles of railroad in the United States where he could have found only about thirty miles in Jackson's administration. The number of miles had increased a thousand times in thirty years. Several short lines connecting New York with Albany and that city with Buffalo were united forming the New York Central and Hudson River railway. It linked together the vessels of the ocean and those of the Great Lakes. The Erie railway was built to connect the ocean with Lake Erie at Cleveland and to reach the Ohio canals. The Pennsylvania railroad was constructed at great expense from Philadelphia across the Alleghany Mountains at Pittsburg. Farther south the Baltimore and Ohio railway connected the ocean with the Ohio River. By 1860, extensions of these "trunk lines" had been pushed farther west.

One could reach the Mississippi on several lines of railroad, and at St. Joseph, Missouri, could reach the Missouri River. From this place, the mails were sent by "overland express" across the continent to California. The post-riders constituting this overland express, on their little ponies flew swiftly across the plains and over the mountains, having once made the entire distance in ten days for a wager. Each rider had his own portion of road to travel, receiving the mail at one end and passing it to the next rider at the other.

NATIONAL UNION AND DISUNION

489. National Feeling.-Slowly the union grew in dignity and importance. Statesmen began to prefer to serve in national rather than state offices. Matters relating to home affairs were left to the states, but those relating to all the people or to foreign countries were quietly given over to the union. Every new state created by the union out of territory governed by the union helped turn the affections of the people away from the old states to the national government. The union prospered and grew rich after Hamilton had given it a good financial system. But the states did not all thrive, and some of them even had to refuse to pay their debts. The people had begun to divide into two classes. Those who believed that the states ought to retain all the powers not given to the national government were said to believe in "state rights." Those who believed in allowing a strong national government were called "unionists." If these differences of opinion had been scattered among the people of all parts of the union, nothing serious might have resulted. Unfortunately they fell in exactly with disputes between the north and south over the influence each had in the national government.

490. Sectional Feeling.-Since the time when a territory could become a state depended largely on the number of people it contained, and since each state had two senators, the influence which any section of the United States could exert in the national government was dependent directly upon its population. In the same way, the more people a state has, the more members it can have in the house of representatives. The increase of population was so much more rapid in the northern than in the southern section, as has already been described in this chapter, that it was impossible to maintain permanently a "balance of power" in the political strength of the two. The north could outvote the south at every point,

The south complained of the large sums of money spent by the national government in improving the rivers and harbors in the northern states, and in building highways and eanals through them. They thought this caused more people to reach that part and to settle there. They also complained because much of this money came from protective tariffs levied by congress and therefore paid by both sections. The "internal improvement" system, they said, brought laborers easily to the northern factories where the tariffs sustained them.

On the other hand, the people of the north claimed that immigrants from Europe preferred to settle in the north because they did not wish to be obliged to compete with slave labor. The north also said that the slavery system created social classes which were objectionable to the immigrant laboring classes. Neither side looked sufficiently at the geography of the country which was responsible in the beginning for the rivers, the harbors, the connecting roads, and the manufactories of the north. Neither did they consider the differences of climate, soil, and productions which made slavery profitable in one section and unprofitable in another.

INVENTIONS AND DISCOVERY

491. During This Period, the inventive genius of America was constantly at work. Farm machinery had greatly improved. The steel plow of Jethro Wood, invented in 1814, had come into general use. The threshing machine. now took the place of the flail; the mowing machine, the place of the scythe and the sickle; and the reaper, patented by Cyrus H. McCormick in 1834, the place of the old-fashioned cradle. Charles Goodyear's process of vulcanizing rubber, discovered in 1839, had built up a large business in the manufacture of rubber goods. Elias Howe's sewing machine, on which he secured a patent in 1846, had lessened the toil of thousands of sewing-women. Letter envelopes

had come into general use. The steel and the gold pen had supplanted the "goose quill." The discovery and use of kerosene, or petroleum oil, had revolutionized the lighting of dwellings. Friction, or lucifer, matches had displaced all oldfashioned methods of "starting fires" or "striking a light.” Manufacturing machinery of all kinds had been made more effective. Locomotives had been greatly improved and the speed on railroads increased. Indeed greater comforts had come into the homes, and abounded everywhere on account of the activity of the inventive genius of America. Morse's telegraph had already been followed by Cyrus W. Field's Atlantic cable and messages had been transmitted from the new to the old world in 1858. Although the absolute success of the cable was not assured until eight years later; still the successful transmission of the message, "Europe and America are united by telegraph. Glory to God in the highest; on earth peace and good will towards men," eloquently told the triumph of the patient inventor, Cyrus W. Field.